The Benefits of a Digital POS Terminal
Whether it’s a countertop POS or a sleek and handy card reader that turns your smartphone into a mPOS, digital POS systems allow you to conduct sales anywhere. This helps reduce the amount of cash on hand and offers better security against theft.
A POS also allows you to document customer information. This can help you avoid time theft, like early clock-ins and buddy punching.
Accepting Payments
When a customer completes their order at your point of sale, they will pay via the payments hardware or software integrated into your POS system. This can include a traditional card reader that lets customers swipe, insert and enter their PIN for credit card payment or mobile wallets like unified payments interface UPI or quick response code QR. Payments are then authorized, and funds sent from the customer’s account to your merchant account through a payments provider.
Modern POS terminals allow you to look up item information and inventory availability, as well as calculate tax and discounts at checkout. Some systems also have integrations with online ordering platforms, expanding your reach to customers who prefer to shop from home. Purchasing or leasing a POS system can help you save money and time while maintaining business operations.
Tracking Inventory
POS systems enable granular and detailed inventory management, noting stock levels for each item and allowing managers to create purchase orders when they reach a predetermined threshold. This can help prevent stockouts and reduce the risk of over-ordering.
A POS system can track and store customer data, enabling personalization of offers and promotions that increase brand loyalty. This can lead to a significant increase in customer retention and sales.
POS systems allow managers to register new members of a loyalty program at checkout, eliminating the need for customers to sign up elsewhere. Depending on the software, this can drive up membership rates by 30% or more. POS terminals can also be used to monitor the activity of employees, helping ensure security and compliance with company policies. This can be especially helpful for restaurants with a high turnover of staff. This can help prevent theft, which is a serious problem for some restaurants. It can also reduce the time needed to count and record inventory, reducing a risk of errors and shrinkage.
Maintaining Customer Information
A smooth checkout is a significant part of the overall customer experience, so it’s important to ensure that your point-of-sale (POS) terminal is well-maintained. This includes ensuring that your employees are logging out of the system when they’re not using it, and also enforcing processes to safeguard customer information.
POS systems can also provide valuable reports and insights, including sales trends and analysis of popular menu items. With this data, you can optimize your operations and improve revenue.
Cybercriminals rely on skimming devices, malware, unpatched software bugs, password crackers, and other methods to breach security and expose customer data. To protect your POS system, implement regular updates and tests to identify vulnerabilities that could be exploited by criminals. You should also store login details for all systems that handle customer data in a secure location. This will help establish an audit trail if an intrusion or data breach occurs. In addition, you should log all activity and monitor system performance for any suspicious activities.
Reporting
POS software provides various types of reports that can help you track and analyze your business’s performance. Whether you’re looking for sales, food, labor, customer satisfaction or inventory reports, the information contained in these reports can help you streamline and enhance operations.
Using these reports can help you determine which items are most popular with customers and when your store is busiest. You can also use them to identify the best performing employees and plan staffing accordingly. These reports can also help you keep track of your labor costs, which are typically one of the highest operational expenses for restaurants.
Another useful feature of a modern POS system is the ability to track all payment methods. This can give you an idea of how many people pay by cash versus those that use debit or credit cards, and may inform decisions about how much change to keep on hand. You can also use this data to set card minimums and analyze patterns in refunds to avoid chargebacks.